Rapid Web News

With technology taking huge leaps in some areas and yet tiny steps in others Scandinavian operator TeliaSonera have launched the world’s first commercial LTE mobile broadband service in Oslo and Stockholm. Speeds are being boasted at 100mbps but are more likely to be up to 80mbps. With HSDPA speeds being just a tenth of that is this a tiny step or a huge leap? Sim cards have been available for laptops (Integral or otherwise) for a number of years now yet developers still seem to be pushing bulky USB devices which tend to put people on edge or at least very conscious of a 4 inch device sticking out of a half inch port.

I do appreciate why they are bulky – mainly due to the fact they’re an aerial but surely there’s a better way? How about utilising PCMCIA/Express card ports on laptops? Possibly incorporating a thin copper antenna which could be stuck around the screens edge? Perhaps I’m shooting myself in the foot with a marketing opportunity. I know that you’d have to have a pretty ancient laptop now not to have a USB port and this is recognised at the standard connection type but come on tech gurus – stop putting useless slots on our laptops which will be the ‘Next big thing in connectivity’ more like the next biggest thing to collect dust…

“We are very proud to be the first operator in the world to offer our customers 4G services,” mobility chief of TeliaSonera Kenneth Karlberg said on Monday. “The use of mobile broadband in the Nordic countries is exploding, and customers need higher speeds and capacity. This is why we launch 4G services in both Stockholm and Oslo.” Sadly the UK slips yet further behind on internet speeds. It’s good to see technology progressing it would just be nice to see it on home turf first for a change.

We can rebuild you, we have the technology…

Boffins at a company called Touch Bionics have developed a bionic hand which would potentially allow the 1.2 million worldwide partial hand amputees an almost fully functional hand! It can allow a multitude of functions to include the ability to pick up fragile objects, write and even hold cutlery all without any surgery.

“There has been no solution like this for the partial hand amputee community. The ProDigits provide a powered device with a grip and it has returned these people to a level of functionality and independence. It is supporting a community that has never had support before.” Says Phil Newman, marketing director of Touch Bionics, an NHS spinoff company in Scotland.

The devices range in price from between £35k and £45k – so not cheap and not really a price that is available to all, but does include the actual ‘hand’, fitting costs, occupational therapy and the ‘skin’ covering. It is fitted to what would be left of the existing hand and can sense signals from the brain, via sensors attached to the skin, and turn them into actual movement.

It’s been several years in development but Richard Branson has now unveiled plans for his ‘Virgin Galactic’ spacecraft. A craft that will fly in tandem with a carrying craft called ‘White Knight Two’. Both crafts will fly to a height of 50,000 feet where ‘SpaceShip Two’ will then detach and blast its way to a height of 65 miles above the earth’s surface under its own jet propulsion.

A flight in Branson’s jet powered wonder bus will cost a cool £120,000 with as many as 300 people already keen to hop aboard. Self confessed flying enthusiast John Travolta is rumoured to have reluctantly turned down a spin – concerned with loss of earnings due to a long training programme.

Created by a guy called Burt Rutan, a famed aviation designer, the craft is based on his prototype SpaceShipOne which won almost a £7,000,000 prize in 2004 for being the first privately-manned craft into space.

Concern over carbon footprint? Worries about burning too much fossil fuel? Neither high on the agenda but you must admit the prospect of space travel is a little bit exciting…

Howard Williams, an enterprising sheep farmer in mid-Wales, has installed a water turbine over a stream just next to his farm. This sterling idea nets Howell a cool £900 a month. He produces 11kw of energy from the small stream shed above the village of Abercraf – roughly enough to power 20 houses.

“It’s not going to generate all of our electricity needs but it’s going to produce a lot of it” says Chris Blake head of a local initiative called The Green Valleys “If we can get 40 or 50 schemes in this area then it really does start to make a big difference.” So if this tech has been available for some time why has it only just started to be put into use? There are dozens of flowing streams up and down the country and if a single turbine hut can produce enough electricity for 20 houses surely it’s worth developing further. At a cost of 25 grand each they’re not cheap but they pay for themselves in little over 2 years, surely there’s not many greener ways to produce fuel?

“This valley probably has scope for four or five such schemes which would make it a carbon negative valley, this within 5 years.” Chris continued. Fair play to the farming boy-o’s.

We have Google Chrome search engine Google OS on the horizon and now Google are starting to develop their own DNS solution.

DNS – the Domain Name System – converts a text URL into numeric IP addresses. This is typically handled by your ISP, but Google wants to perform this task in its own way;

“The average Internet user ends up performing hundreds of DNS lookups each day, and some complex pages require multiple DNS lookups before they start loading,” stated Prem Ramaswami, he went on to say; “This can slow down the browsing experience. Our research has shown that speed matters to Internet users, so over the past several months our engineers have been working to make improvements to our public DNS resolver to make users’ web-surfing experiences faster, safer and more reliable.” Now I myself have just over a 10 Meg line which is more than fast enough for me but I’m just curious as to how this will filter down for the average Jo but I suppose it is still in the ‘idea’ stage.

“It’s not clear that Internet users really want Google to keep control over so much more of their Internet experience than they do already – from Chrome OS at the bottom of the stack to Google Search at the top, it is becoming an end-to-end infrastructure all run by Google, the largest advertising company in the world. I prefer a heterogeneous Internet with lots of parties collaborating to make this thing work as opposed to an Internet run by one big company.” This is a statement from OpenDNS founder David Ulevitch. Interesting internet times…